KARACHI, July 2(Dawn): There is one doctor per 1310 people in Pakistan and one
nurse for every 4636 patients. It is therefore welcome news that students
enrolled in the post-RN BScN programme at the Institute of Nursing of the Dow
University of Health Sciences (DUHS) will graduate in December. The Institute's
building is due to be completed next year.

At a programme entitled
"Positive workplace environment enhances quality patient care," held in
connection with the International Day of Nursing at DUHS on Saturday, the vice
chancellor of the university Dr Masood Hameed Khan pointed out that Pakistan is
facing an acute shortage of nurses in both public and private sectors.

To
address this problem, DUHS set up the Institute of Nursing last year, a Rs182
million project approved by the Higher Education Commission. Rather than waiting
for the completion of the building, the post-RN BScN classes were started at the
Ojha campus' Paramedical Institute building last year and the first batch of 50
students will graduate in December. He added that the target was to initiate
Masters and PhD programmes in the future.

Thanking the Aga Khan School of
Nursing for its help in developing the institute's curriculum, Dr Khan announced
that the Ojha Institute of Chest Diseases would soon be up-graded to a 500-bed
teaching hospital and that admissions for the upcoming MBA in pharmaceutical and
healthcare management programmes would start in September.

The project
director of the DUHS Institute of Nursing, Dr Sharaf Ali Shah, said that while
there were an estimated 39,223 nurses in Pakistan, hardly a thousand of these
had graduate degrees and the DUHS nursing institute therefore expected to play a
pivotal role.

He spoke about the low numbers of doctors and nurses in the
country, due to reasons that include the lack of political commitment, low
investment in nursing education, the acute shortage of qualified teachers and
the poor image of the nursing profession.

The registrar of the Pakistan
Nursing Council (PNC), Ms Nighat Durrani, said that with the help of the Higher
Education Commission, the PNC had developed a standard curriculum and planned to
gradually move towards degree programmes. She added that five public sector
universities had started post-RN BScN programmes.

At the end of the
function, shields were presented to nurses who helped in the establishment of
the DUHS Institute of Nursing, including Yasmin Amarsi, dean of the AKU School
of Nursing, Dr Rozina Karmaliani, director of the MScN programme at the AKU
School of Nursing, Afshan Nazli, principal of the School of Nursing at the
National Institute of Child Health and PNC registrar Nighat Durrani. Shields
were also given to Aalia Nasir, Ilmiya Mughal, Mushtaq Ahmed and Ghulam
Fatima.